This week, another terrific writer announces he is ceasing production right at the height of his success. A famous architect has a minor meltdown at a press conference and gives the finger to a reporter for asking a perfectly reasonable question. I see a link between these two things.
First the writer. Michel Faber, the brilliant Scots-Australian author of Under the Skin (the book that inspired the film with Scarlett Johansson), announced at a London bookstore signing last week that he wouldn't be writing another novel. (He has said he may write poetry and short stories, but only because nobody reads them.) He is only 54 and he is really at the apex of his career: Each of his few books has been a critical rave, and one of them was turned into a four-part BBC TV miniseries. His new novel – a dreamy sci-fi called The Book of Strange New Things – is already attracting gushing praise in the highest quarters.
Why quit now? In this case, sadness: Faber recently lost his wife of 26 years, Eva Youren, to cancer. He has always said that she was the one who encouraged him to write seriously – he was working as a nurse when they met. Faber is a shy and nervous man, and is usually described as eccentric. He and Youren lived for many years in remote northern Scotland; The Scotsman described him as "a writer so reclusive he makes the Loch Ness monster look like an extrovert."
I met Faber a dozen years ago and he displayed no signs of weirdness, but was friendly and charming. Still, he admitted to every interviewer that he relied on Youren not only as his first reader but to get him through the practicalities of every day; she seemed to be his buffer against the world. To renounce long-form writing seems, for him, like a renunciation of the world itself, for it was in publicizing those books that he had the most contact with the world.
There's a paradox involved here, for the artist's subject matter is the world. Why do artists, particularly writers, often seem so reluctant to participate in the very society they take pains to describe?
Faber isn't the only literary great to retire long before the end of consciousness. Philip Roth made an announcement about being done with writing and public appearances in 2012 and, as he still seemed to be at the height of his literary powers, the decision was puzzling. Alice Munro said she was retiring in 2013, and had made similar threats before (although it's unclear whether she is reconsidering). The other great examples of quitter writers are all said to have different reasons: Harper Lee never published a thing after To Kill a Mockingbird, maybe out of performance anxiety. J.D. Salinger, same thing – and also because of his deep sense that the world was corrupt. E.M. Forster stopped writing fiction after he discovered sex in 1924; the theory is that his new life was just more exciting than the cerebral one.
They rarely explain it clearly. One element recurs, though: a nervousness that's not about writing but about all the interaction that goes along with it. The publicity, yes, but also the political debates, the pressure to take a stand on things.
That pressure has increased recently. The Internet is a great lure to non-artistic expression; the controversies of the day seem so pressing in comparison to one's private and unfinished project. (This has been particularly true these past couple of weeks: I wonder how many Canadian artists have got any work done. After writing a few 1,000-word Facebook diatribes one is drained of creativity; one hardly needs to create any more. I'm pretty sure most artists regret having a computer this week.)
Artists have always been in a precarious position: They must closely follow the events of the world – politics, fashion, everything – and yet to properly observe it all they must be outside it. They must have a lot of peace and quiet. It is too much to ask them to not have political views, but if they spend their whole day arguing on the Internet then their string quartet – even a political one – is going to be delayed. All the ideological critical voices artists hear, worrying about the progressive or regressive value of their art, are frightening, dangerous, toxic even – once they get inside you they can paralyze you.
Artists must see what parties in New York look like if they want to have some sense of how the world functions, but all their instincts tell them to live in the country so they don't have to get too embroiled in rivalries or too conscious of current artistic trends and political values, (which are pretty much the same thing).
We kind of want artists to be outsiders, too – there is the mythos of the artist as absolute individualist, the person who simply doesn't care what you think.
This is where the famous architect comes in. Frank Gehry was asked, at a conference in Spain where he was receiving an award, to comment on critiques that his work was mere "spectacle." The 85-year-old demigod of architecture critics raised his middle finger and lectured the reporter on how great he was. "Once in a while … a group of people do something special. Very few, but God, leave us alone." It was a grouchy response to a guy who was just doing his job, and Gehry later apologized.
He immediately became a hero. The New Yorker's art critic called Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao the best building of the last half-century and wondered how anyone could question the man's greatness. "I mean, compared to what, people?" eye-rolled Peter Schjeldahl. A Tumblr quickly appeared, showing pictures of every great modernist architect – Le Corbusier to Niemeyer to Philip Johnson – flipping the bird to the world. (They were Photoshopped.) See, this is what we want, irrationally, from artists, just as we want it from rock 'n' roll stars. This is why pop singer M.I.A. gave the finger to the Super Bowl. We feel that, intuitively, the ideal artist must reflect a generalized, all-purpose opposition. The artist must not care if she is popular or not, or even is in the right or the wrong. The artist, in legend, tries to be above.
It's a hard line to walk. And a wavering one: It begins in defiance and isolation, and yet it ends, at its most extreme, in complete silence.